BRISA

Bénédicte Martin

(JC Lattès, 150 pages, 2018)

*** NOMINATED FOR THE 2018 FRANÇOISE SAGAN PRIZE ***

Bénédicte Martin lives with her son in the Parisian apartment that belonged to her grandparents, Pierre and Brisa. She inhabits the very same rooms, pushes the same doors, and opens the same windows as they did. But Martin’s intimate connection with her family history goes deeper than the tangible legacy of these walls. There is another, more elusive inheritance that she feels compelled to explore and claim as her own in order to come to terms with the woman she has become.

Martin’s family memoir begins with a woman who, although not a blood relative, played a central role in the life of Pierre and Brisa. Born in the Mediterranean harbor of Toulon at the turn of the twentieth century—Eleonore Madame Yvonne as she was later known— was the illegitimate daughter of an heir and a laundress. She came into a large inheritance, which she immediately used to settle in a luxurious Parisian hotel and throw herself into the dazzling nightlife of the capital. There, at last, she could live openly as a woman who loves women. After World War II, she became a madam, the informant and friend of Pierre, a former resistance fighter turned police chief. Madly in love with his idle wife Brisa, she inserted herself permanently into their lives.

As she retraces the past, Martin interposes reflections on her life. She does so seamlessly and without warning. Martin finds inspiring, yet also disquieting, similarities between the singular lives she reimagines and her own, and her exercise in uncovering points of multiple identifications feels at times like a form of exorcism. Inheritance is, for Martin, much broader than blood alone. It has a moral dimension that is transmitted not just through our family histories but also through our collective past.

Martin’s language is impassioned when she invokes the right, but also the suffering and challenges, of living differently. It is merciless when she speaks of unreciprocated desire, raw when she depicts the sadness of bought sex and lucid when it comes to the dirty money upon which Madame Yvonne’s largesse is built upon. With Brisa, Martin has written an incandescent and corrosive family memoir with a subversive absence of sentimentality.